


TMNT: Renewal

by mumfro



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2012), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Action, F/M, M/M, Multi, Some Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 05:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1292356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumfro/pseuds/mumfro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two months are gone, Miwa is dead, the Kraang have been defeated, and the Shredder has been thrown into prison. Leonardo, unfeeling and hollow, tries to figure out why today seems so different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	TMNT: Renewal

                There was an air in the sewers unlike that which normally could be found floating through the rotten, filth-tainted atmosphere today. Today, Leonardo had noticed, seemed to be different from all the other days in the year. Not that anything special had occurred since he had woken; it was just that today, he had woken up differently—as in, his morning had been _off_.

            His normal morning schedule, which consisted of just getting out of bed and throwing his sword sheaths over his shell, started out with waking up to the scent of burning gasoline drifting into his room from underneath the space of his door. Normally, Leonardo would have gotten up out of bed and gone to check on the source of the smell, but this morning he couldn’t even find the energy to turn his head to the side and check the glowing numbers on his alarm clock. As he had noticed as soon as he opened his eyes, today was going to be a “different day.”

            The day prior, Leonardo had spent the afternoon just the same as he had been spending them ever since that battle two months ago. Instead of preoccupying himself with training in the dojo and challenging Splinter to battles, he found himself being holed up in his bedroom and spending hours at a time under the covers; not sleeping, just staring up at the ceiling of the room and thinking.

            The other Turtles had noticed that Leonardo had been acting out of character, as he could tell. Not that he needed any, but Leonardo had tolerated what Michelangelo called “cheering up,” which included cooking extravagant dinners with leftover algae and fish from the streams that Raphael occasionally caught. But what Leonardo needed wasn’t cheering up, as he could tell; he was just “different.” Something had changed inside of him after that battle against the Kraang, but it certainly wasn’t because of something like depression. He was going through an identity crisis as far as he could sense, and it was going rough.

            One thing was for sure; he was still the son of Hamato Yoshi and the brother of three other turtles, all of whom were mutants created through an accidental and disastrous encounter with a canister of green liquid called Mutagen. These days, Mutagen was hard to come by and anyone afflicted by its chemically-changing properties could easily be returned to their original form through the use of Retromutagen that Leonardo’s bright brother Donatello had managed to manufacture not that long ago.

            As Leonardo stared up at the grimy stones of his ceiling, he wondered if this was the reason why he was having such a large identity crisis; the search for the Mutagen that his brothers had endured for over a year was over, and now there was nothing for the Turtles to be doing except hanging out with April and Casey; even that was difficult to do now, Leonardo realized, since the pair had become a couple immediately following the aftermath of the Kraang’s botched invasion. They were preoccupied with each other now, but they were happy. Occasionally Leonardo felt as though they had forgotten the Turtles, but their periodic visits accompanied with a large pizza with pepperoni (Michelangelo’s favorite) helped break up those feelings of ennui that everyone within the lair was now facing.

            Having gone through another long contemplative thinking session for well over an hour, Leonardo finally mustered up enough energy to turn his head to the side to check his alarm clock.

            “… 7:32,” he moaned while rubbing his eye with the back of his hand. “… It’s still pretty early… Maybe I could go for some more sleep.”

            He yawned and flipped back over to close his eyes just as he heard Donatello’s distressed voice far down the hallway.

            Donatello’s loud swear was cut off mid-sentence by a thundering explosion that caused Leonardo’s room to shake and his posters of oriental katana to fall. Retaining the reflexes that he exercised so frequently before sending the Kraang back to their dimension and throwing Shredder in prison, Leonardo sprung out of his bed and snatched his katana from the desk by the door. He sprinted down the hallway out of his room, running past Michelangelo’s, Raphael’s and Donatello’s rooms, out into the living room, and past the large steel doors to the garage.

            The purple bandana-clad turtle was covered in black soot when Leonardo rushed in, although a fire was nowhere in sight. Everything in the garage, from the glass cabinet filled with assorted chemicals and leftover mutagen, to the tools Donatello kept so neatly sorted out, to the Shellraiser that he spent ungodly hours tuning and reworking, was covered in a thick half-inch of black filth. The only thing that seemed to have some color was Donatello’s shell, which had apparently been facing away from the apparent source of the explosion: a pristinely clean, blocky hunk that appeared to be made up of steel plates that had been welded together. In front of the odd block was Donatello, who was on his behind and looking at the contraption before him through his soot-stained goggles.

            Donatello paid no attention to Leonardo when his brother ran inside, only stopping to wipe the soot off of his goggles while reaching for a clipboard and pencil. “Well, that didn’t go as expected,” he exhaled noisily.

            Astounded, Leonardo stepped through the grunge on the ground and joined Donatello at his side.

            “Hey,” he stammered as he looked around the room some more. “… Are you okay? Did something… go wrong?”

            “What? Oh, hey Leo,” Donatello replied, refusing to acknowledge the questions that his brother had just asked him. As always, Leonardo noticed, Donatello was “lost” from the outside world when preoccupied with whatever he was determined to work on, fix, or invent. Unlike Leonardo, Donatello had a hobby that helped him stay busy during the boring months after clearing out nearly 80% of the crime in Manhattan. Unlike Leonardo, Donatello wasn’t facing an exhausting existentialist crisis.

            Donatello stepped over the hunk towards a cabinet filled with tools, grabbed a screwdriver with a pivoting head, and unscrewed one metal sheet on the block that hadn’t been welded to the others. After watching his brother remove the metal sheet, Leonardo noticed the familiar blinking lights and wires underneath. It was panel, and, from what Leonardo could observe, was obviously some form of technology that could have only belonged to the Kraang.

When Donatello had elevated himself off the ground, Leonardo spoke again in a more forceful tone. “Donatello, what are you doing?” he asked with a little too much energy, causing him to stumble on his words at the end of his sentence. This time, Donatello seemed to truly hear what he said and replied quickly.

            “Nothing big,” responded Donatello. “Just working on an experiment of mine… I’ve been working on it for a couple of days, thinking that everything would just fall into place”—he turned to the metal heap and rubbed it with a concerned hand as his forehead furrowed—“but it hasn’t.” His words dropped at the end of the sentence as he shook his head. “It’s a device that I designed with Kraang technology to drastically improve the speed of the Shellraiser, but I just can’t quite get the particles inside to accelerate fast enough to generate the power needed for the Shellraiser to go. It’s kind of like a nuclear fission reactor, although on a much smaller scale. All I’d need is a millisecond for the molecules to move fast enough to activate the device and it would multiply the speed of the Shellraiser threefold and power it for a week. Amazing, right? And surprisingly clean when operated correctly.” He trailed off at the end of his words and, picking the soot-covered sketchpad and pencil off of the ground, walked out of the garage and towards the living room while scribbling furiously.

            As Leonardo watched Donatello take a seat on the purple couch (soon to be stained black by the soot on his body), he shook his head and stared around the garage. There were tools everywhere, and a new motor was now poking out of the front of the Shellraiser, but what was the point of all of Donatello’s arduous work? Crime in Manhattan was at an all-time low with Shredder locked up, his associates either along with him or dead, and Karai wouldn’t be around to screw with them.

            His thoughts stopped in their tracks. As he glared down at the shiny metal hunk reflecting his distraught face, he pictured Karai’s nonchalant face winking at him at the last spot he had spoken to her before she went off to sacrifice herself for the sake of the Turtles. Karai, or Miwa, as Leonardo had been forcing himself to call her recently, had been killed right in front Splinter’s eyes while jumping in front of one of Shredder’s attacks that was aimed at April. She didn’t even have time to give her true father any last words before she succumbed to her wounds and passed out. Despite all forms of rescue that the Turtles had attempted on her, Miwa died in Splinter’s hands and threw him into the worst state that Leonardo had ever seen his master in. Like Leonardo, Splinter had spent his days holed up in his room but came out for only a brief thirty minutes every day to meditate in the dojo; during those minutes, there was an unspoken rule between the Turtles to leave him to his business. The week before, however, Leonardo had not seen his master in the dojo but did catch sight of him in the kitchen making a small lunch, which was even more uncommon.

            Rarer still, Leonardo had heard Splinter talking to himself about what to reach for to prepare the sandwich he had made. In that instance, Leonardo breathed a sigh of relief for the sight of what he thought was the beginning of his master’s recovery, although the week following was spent with Splinter, once again, only coming out of his room to meditate. The water balloon that Michelangelo had placed under his master’s pillow was not even enough to drag Splinter out of his room in a failed attempt on the orange bandana-clad turtle’s hand to get some reaction from his father, which upset Michelangelo far beyond how he would have felt had he just received a stern punishment.

            Leonardo, while deeply upset with Miwa’s passing, understood that he could have no comprehension of Master Splinter’s grief. The thought of looking down at Miwa’s lifeless corpse in his eyes was just… breathtakingly horrible to Leonardo.

            Breaking out of his trance, Leonardo exited the garage as well and took a seat next to Donatello, who was too busy scribbling madly and muttering under his breath to take notice; “Looks like electrical radiation won’t work… Maybe if I use a form of energy subjugation, I can power the device at half of its initial power… But then that means that I’d have to cut the size of it in half…” Donatello continued muttering as Leonardo reached for the television remote but did not seem to turn it stared around the room.

            The living room was, for the most part, intact even after the movie night that the Turtles had tried enjoying the night before. While popcorn still remained strewn into the fabric of the moss-covered rug underneath the rusty coffee table, the room itself was much cleaner than usual. The kitchen, however, was another matter. Stacks and piles of grimy plates had begun to collect over the past few days, and now there was a tower of tableware that rose even over Donatello’s head. The only clean spot there was on the island was a small opening between the towers of plates that the Turtles used to communicate when they were in separate rooms. To make matters worse, a strange odor seemed to be wafting out from the refrigerator, something which Leonardo was sure was coming from a four day-old pizza that Michelangelo had refused to throw out the night before. The only things left glittering in the lair now were the arcade machines that glowed with the suggestion of inserting another 50 cents. Maybe today would be the day that they would clean the lair, Leonardo thought.

            Leonardo was just reaching for the television to preoccupy himself when a shriek rang out through the lair. Within half a second, Leonardo was on his feet with his katana in both hands and standing next to Donatello, who gripped his staff tightly. As they looked down the hallway from where the scream came, Donatello glanced at Leonardo from the corner of his eye and whispered, “What was that? It came from the bedrooms…”

            His words were trailed without delay by another scream, although this one seemed to echo as it grew closer and closer to Leonardo and Donatello. Instantly recognizing the voice and the predictable stamping of feet as the culprit behind the scream came closer and closer to the living room, Leonardo slid his katana back into their sheaths and groaned impatiently, “It can’t be… Not this early in the day.”

            Like Leonardo had predicted, Michelangelo raced around the corner screaming holding a growing lump on the top of his head. Behind him, just outside of arm’s reach, Raphael was swearing loudly and swinging his arms at Michelangelo’s head like an angry gorilla.

            “I’m going to freaking clobber you!” bellowed Raphael, throwing a punch at his brother’s head as they finally entered the living room. The orange bandana-clad turtle ducked as he screamed one more time and slid between Donatello’s legs like a baseball batter. Without losing momentum, he leapt to his feet and ran away as Raphael collided into Donatello and fell to the ground on top of him.

            “Leo!” Michelangelo shrieked, running into the kitchen and dashing behind the island in fear. “Help me! Raph’s gone crazy!”

            Raphael’s response was much louder and more startling than Michelangelo’s, compelling Leonardo to jump and wonder why the towers of plates had not toppled over at the force of his brother’s voice. “ _I’ve_ gone insane!? It’s you who’s crazy, you little ass! I was minding my own business and you come into my room trying to hide a water balloon above my door!”

            “So!?” Michelangelo began. “It’s not like it worked! The balloon didn’t fall on you…”

            “Yeah, only ‘cause I stopped you before you could! But that’s not why I’m pissed off…!” He turned to Leonardo and pointed one long finger at Michelangelo’s round, panicking face. “He ruined my comics when he let the balloon go and splash water _all over them_! Of course I’m gonna be upset, and you deserve _every punch I can get onto that scrawny head of yours_!” A couple more swears followed his words as he continued pointing a jagged, trembling finger at his brother while Donatello, who had finally recovered from having the wind knocked out of him by Raphael falling on top of him, approached Raphael cautiously in an attempt to try and abate the situation.

            Leonardo could barely hear the crackling of the television set turning on when Raphael bounded over the island in the kitchen (knocking over the towers of plates while doing so) and landing on top of Michelangelo, pinning him to the ground with his elbow as the orange bandana-clad turtle let out one last scream before losing his breath from the impact.

            Returning to the couch and ignoring Donatello’s efforts to please Raphael’s anger with a ceasefire, Leonardo sat down and chuckled to himself. Out of everyone in the family, Raphael was the only one who took the defeat of the Kraang very positively. Sure, he was upset with Splinter’s newfound tendency to shut out the world around him, but he had proven himself by defeating the Kraang and helping his brothers take out Shredder with pure muscle. He even occasionally ventured out into the streets of Manhattan above to take care of minor crimes like robberies, although these actions were never alongside his brothers. He would even find times to get together with Casey, who would help clear out crime in the city alongside him. Things were going well for Raphael, but whenever he was in the lair he would become increasingly short-tempered.

            Meanwhile, Michelangelo seemed to be taking the newfound quietness the worst out of the brothers. His desperate attempts to start some sort of noise within the lair included tossing water balloons, replacing the cream of the Oreos in the pantry with toothpaste, and wrapping toilet seats with saran wrap, all in increasing order of annoyance. The longer and more boring the days seemed to pass, Michelangelo’s pranks got worse, although Leonardo could see that he never truly meant harm. Michelangelo’s only desire, as far as his blue bandana-clad brother could infer, was to spark some movement and life into his family, all of whom were too busy shutting off the world around them.

            As he thought of this, Leonardo winced and glanced back at Michelangelo with troubled eyes. Although knowing full well what his younger brother’s intentions were, Leonardo was still acting too selfish to try and awarding Michelangelo the satisfaction of giving him some sort of reaction to his pranks and was instead locking all the doors behind him to shut everything away and go on some stupid self-discovery journey.

            Promising that he would try to make it up to Michelangelo later by reacting to one of his pranks, Leonardo turned away from the commotion and gazed back at the glowing television set in front of him. Instead of finding a normal news report as always, however, Leonardo finds himself staring at the quivering frame of the blonde newscaster Patricia Banks standing in front of an abandoned corner building. Her face showed that she was evidently panicking, forcing him to strain to hear the broadcast that she was releasing over the shouts of Raphael hitting Michelangelo while Donatello tried to detain him.

            Realizing that there was no way to hear the broadcast over the shouting of his brothers, Leonardo shouted in equal volume, “ _Will you guys keep it down in there!? I’m trying to listen to what’s going on!”_

            Immediately the shouting stopped, allowing Leonardo to pay closer attention to Patricia. While it was obvious that the chill of the winter breeze was one factor contributing to her trembling, but the way her brows wrinkled with concern seemed to suggest that she was also shaking with fear. Behind her, a large crowd seemed to be alternating between staring and pointing up at the corner building and glancing back at the camera recording Patricia. Donatello also noticed how panicked she seemed to be and rushed over to join Leonardo on the couch and listen to what she was trying to say.

            “ _I repeat, there has been a kidnapping on the corner of 49 th Street and Parker. The suspect appears to be a group of men in their late twenties-early thirties, while the hostage is believed to be a 17-year-old boy from Roosevelt High School. The hostage is being held at gunpoint by the suspect inside the abandoned building at this corner and will only be exchanged once $800,000 are handed over to the suspect. That’s all we know for now. This is Channel 10 news correspondent Patricia Banks reporting to you live and keeping you in check…_”

            As the woman’s broadcast ended, Leonardo gawked at Donatello with wide eyes to see if he had been paying attention the whole time. Seeing Donatello’s eyes wide with surprise, Leonardo gulped. Somewhere in the back of his head, a voice was telling him that this was the day. But would the mission go over well? It would be the first time the Turtles have gone to the surface as a group since the defeat of the Kraang; in an instance like this, stealth would be important to avoid the news broadcasters, but if they acted quickly, they might be able to pull off the mission… Maybe this is exactly what they need to do to get back on track, Leonardo thought.

Finally, Donatello looked down at Leonardo; before he could open his mouth, Leonardo said adamantly, “We have to go. I don’t think the feds are gonna be able to get that kid back safely.”

Donatello jumped at Leonardo’s words, but this did not stop him from adding his input. “But Leo,” he began, “we can’t go out there now! It’s daytime; someone will see us! Master Splinter will be upset, and we can’t get him any more disappointed…” He remarked this as he wheeled around to look at the dojo, where Splinter was most likely trying to meditate.

Leonardo’s eyes followed his brother’s; while he respected and understood Donatello’s words that concerned Splinter’s well-being, he was filled with an air of confidence, as well as a slight taste of excitement, that he and his brothers could pull off this mission. As much as he regretted actually feeling enthusiasm, Leonardo was partially happy with this sudden event taking place because it would give him an excuse to leave the lair and finally get some much-needed fresh air. Perhaps this would help Leonardo rediscover himself.

            He looked back up at Donatello and furrowed his forehead to reinstate his position as leader of the group. He spoke adamantly, “The kid’s being held on the corner of 49th and Parker. If we take the rooftops, we probably won’t be seen. … You hear that, Raph!? Mikey!?”

            It was the first time Leonardo had referred to his brothers by their nicknames in over a week; the way Donatello seemed shocked at Leonardo’s sudden burst of self-assurance helped show that Leonardo was right in thinking that this would help break himself out of his slump. Things were finally starting to fall back into place again and return to normal, Leonardo thought.

            Maybe this is why the morning started off “differently.”

            After an awkward 3 seconds of complete silence, Raphael poked his head around the corner of the island with eyes as wide as dinner plates. Having been released from Raphael’s weight, Michelangelo scrambled to his feet and ran off down the hallway to his room without saying a word or looking at Leonardo, leaving Raphael to continue staring at Raphael with his jaw hanging open.

            “W-what did you say?” Raphael stuttered, picking himself off the ground and swiping the dust off of his plastron. Just as his eyes met Leonardo’s, the leader of the Turtles smiled with anticipation and repeated, as he tightened the knot of his bandana, “We’re going out. Get your stuff, and if you already have it, then follow me.”

            He glanced back at Splinter’s dojo and, losing his smile for a second, continued, “We won’t be gone for long.”


End file.
